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Buddhism is a prominent religion and cultural
concept in the United
States accounting for 0.9% of the US population making it
the fourth largest belief-set behind Christianity, Judaism
and Nonreligious. Many American
Buddhists are Asian Americans as well
as a large number of converts. . The U.S. presents a strikingly new
and different environment for Buddhists, leading to a unique
history and a continuing process of development as Buddhism and
America become increasingly compatible.

In the Christian era, Buddhist ideas would periodically filter into
Europe via the Middle East. A notable example
is the story of Barlaam and Josaphat, folk heroes who were canonized by
the Roman Catholic Church and
whose story is believed to be an altered account of the life of
Siddhartha Gautama, translated
from Persian to Arabic to Greek. The first direct encounter between
European Christians and Buddhists to be recorded was in 1253 when
the king of France sent William of
Rubruck as an ambassador to the court of the Mongol Empire. Later, in the 17th century, a group of
Mongols practicing Tibetan Buddhism
established Kalmykia, the only
Buddhist nation in Europe, at the eastern edge of the
continent.

Buddhism in the New World

Because the above examples produced very little real religious
interaction, the European settlers who would come to colonize the Americas had virtually no exposure to Buddhism.
This almost complete isolation would last largely undisturbed until
the 19th century, when significant numbers of immigrants from
East Asia began to arrive in the New
World. In
the United States, the first immigrants from China entered
around 1820, but they began to arrive in large numbers following
the California Gold Rush of
1849.The first Buddhist temple
in America was built in 1853 in San Francisco by the Sze Yap Company, a Chinese American fraternal society.
Another society, the Ning Yeong Company, built a second in 1854; by
1875, there were eight such temples, and by 1900 there were
approximately 400 Chinese temples on the west coast of the United
States, most of them containing at least some Buddhist elements.
These temples were often the subject of suspicion and ignorance by
the rest of the population, and were dismissively referred to as
joss houses.

The
Chinese Exclusion
Act of 1882 curtailed the growth of the Chinese American
population, but large-scale immigration from Japan began in the
late 1880s and from Korea around
1903.In both cases, immigration was at first
limited primarily to Hawaii.
Populations from other Asian Buddhist countries followed, and in
each case, the new communities established Buddhist temples and
organizations. For instance, the first Japanese temple in Hawaii
was built in 1896 near Paauhau by the Honpa Hongwanji branch of
Jodo Shinshu. In 1898, Japanese
missionaries and immigrants established a Young Men's Buddhist
Association, and the Rev. Sōryū Kagahi was dispatched from Japan to
be the first Buddhist missionary in Hawaii. The first Japanese
Buddhist temple in the continental U.S. was built in San Francisco in 1899, and the first in Canada was built at
the Ishikawa Hotel in Vancouver in 1905 [111847]. The first Buddhist clergy to take up residence in
the continental U.S. were Shuye Sonoda and Kakuryo Nishimjima,
missionaries from Japan who arrived in 1899.

At about the same time that Asian immigrants were first starting to
arrive in America, some American intellectuals were beginning to
come to terms with Buddhism, based primarily on information
reaching them from British colonial possessions in India and East
Asia. The Englishmen William
Jones and Charles Wilkins had
done pioneering work translating Sanskrit texts into English. The American Transcendentalists and associated persons,
in particular Henry David
Thoreau took an interest in Hindu and
Buddhist philosophy. In 1844, The
Dial, a small literary publication edited by Thoreau and
Ralph Waldo Emerson, published
the first English version of a portion of the Lotus Sutra; it had been translated by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody from a
French version recently completed by Eugène Burnouf (this translation is
often attributed to Thoreau himself, but this appears to be
erroneous). His Indian readings may have influenced his later
experiments in simple living: at one point in Walden he wrote: "I realized what the Orientals
meant by contemplation and the forsaking of works." The poet
Walt Whitman also admitted to an
influence of Indian religion on his writings.

The first prominent American to publicly convert to Buddhism was
Henry Steel Olcott. Olcott, a
former U.S. army colonel during the Civil War, had grown increasingly
interested in reports of supernatural phenomena that were popular
in the late 19th century. In 1875, he, along with Helena Blavatsky and William Quan Judge founded the Theosophical Society, which was
dedicated to the study of the occult and was partly influenced by
Hindu and Buddhist scriptures. The group's leaders believed or
claimed to believe that they were in contact, via visions and
messages, with a secret order of adepts referred to as the
"Himalayan Brotherhood" or "the Masters". In 1879, Olcott and
Blavatsky travelled to India and then, in 1880, to Sri Lanka, where they were met enthusiastically by local
Buddhists, who saw them as allies against an aggressive Christian
missionary movement. On May 25 of that
year, Olcott and Blavatsky took the pancasila vows of a lay Buddhist before a
monk and a large crowd of onlookers. Although most of the
Theosophists appear to have counted themselves as Buddhists, they
held idiosyncratic beliefs that separated them from all known
Buddhist traditions; only Olcott was enthusiastic about following
mainstream Buddhism. He would return to Sri Lanka on two further
occasions, where he worked to promote Buddhist education, and also
visited Japan and Burma.
Olcott authored a Buddhist Catechism, stating his view of
the basic tenets of the religion.

A series of new publications greatly increased public knowledge of
Buddhism in 19th century America. In 1879, Edwin Arnold, an English aristocrat, published
The Light of Asia[111848], an epic poem he had written about the
life and teachings of the Buddha,
expounded with much wealth of local color and not a little felicity
of versification. The book became immensely popular in the United
States, going through eighty editions and selling more than 500,000
copies. Dr. Paul Carus, a German American
philosopher and theologian, was at work on
a more scholarly prose treatment of the same subject. Carus was the
director of Open Court
Publishing Company, an academic publishing house specializing
in philosophy, science, and religion, and
editor of The Monist, a journal
with a similar focus, both based in La Salle, Illinois. In 1894,
Carus published The Gospel of the Buddha, which was
compiled from a variety of Asian texts and, true to its name,
presented the Buddha's story in a form resembling the Christian
Gospels.

Perhaps
the most significant event in the 19th century history of Buddhism
in America was the Parliament of the World's
Religions, held in Chicago in 1893.Although most of the delegates to the
Parliament were Christians of various denominations, the Buddhist
nations of China, Japan, Thailand, and Sri Lanka sent representatives.
Buddhist delegates included Soyen Shaku,
a Japanese Zen abbott; Zenshiro Noguchi, a
Japanese translator; Anagarika
Dharmapala, a Sri Lankan associate of H. S. Olcott's; and
Chandradat Chudhadharn, a brother of King Chulalongkorn of Thailand. Paul Carus also
attended as an observer. The Parliament provided the first major
public forum from which Buddhists could address themselves directly
to the Western public; Dharmapala was particularly effective in
this role because he spoke fluent English.

A few days after the end of the Parliament, in a brief ceremony
conducted by Anagarika Dharmapala, Charles T.Strauss, a New York businessman of Jewish
descent, became, it is believed, the first person to formally
convert to Buddhism on American soil. A few fledgling attempts at
establishing a Buddhism for Americans followed. One of the most
interesting, in fact, had initially appeared prior to the
Parliament, met with little fanfare, in 1887: The Buddhist
Ray, a Santa Cruz, California-based magazine published and edited by Phillangi
Dasa, born Herman Carl (or Carl Herman) Veetering (or Vettering), a
recluse about whom little is known. The Ray's tone
was, in the words of Rick Fields, "ironic, light, saucy,
self-assured ... one-hundred-percent American Buddhist" (Fields,
1981), which was by all means a novel development in that time and
place. It ceased publication in 1894. Elsewhere, six white San
Franciscans, working with Japanese Jodo Shinshu missionaries,
established the Dharma Sangha of Buddha in 1900 and began
publishing a bimonthly magazine, The Light of Dharma. In
Illinois, Paul Carus wrote further books about Buddhism and
attempted setting portions of Buddhist scripture to Western
classical music.

Early 20th century

In the first half of the 20th century, it would prove to be
Buddhist teachers from Japan who played the most active role in
disseminating Buddhism to the American public, perhaps because
Japan was the most developed and self-confident Buddhist country at
the time. In 1905, Soyen Shaku was invited to stay in the United
States by a Mr. and Mrs. Russell, a wealthy American couple. He
lived for nine months in their home near San Francisco, where he
established a small zendo in their home and
gave regular zazen lessons, making him the
first Zen Buddhist priest to teach in North America. This short sojourn eventually
produced an effect on American Buddhism that continues to the
present. Shortly after Shaku settled in to his
erstwhile home, he was followed by Nyogen
Senzaki, a young monk from Shaku's home temple in Japan.
Senzaki briefly worked for the Russell family and then, expressing
his desire to stay in America, he was reportedly advised by Shaku
to spend seventeen years as an ordinary worker before teaching
Buddhism. Thus, it was in 1922 that Senzaki first rented a hall and
gave an English talk on a paper by Soyen Shaku; his periodic talks
at different locations became known as the "floating zendo".
In 1931,
he established a permanent sitting hall in Los Angeles, where he would teach until his death in
1958.

Another Zen teacher, Sokatsu Shaku,
one of Soyen Shaku's senior students, arrived in late 1906,
founding a Zen meditation center called Ryomokyo-kai. Although he stayed only a few
years and had limited contact with the English-speaking public, one
of his disciples, Shigetsu Sasaki,
made a permanent home. Sasaki, better known under his monastic name
Sokei-an, spent a few years wandering the west coast of the United
States, at one point living among American Indians near
Seattle, and reached New York City in 1916. After completing his training and
being ordained in 1928, he returned to New York to teach. In 1931,
his small group incorporated as the Buddhist Society of America,
later renamed the First Zen Institute of America. By the late
1930s, one of his most active supporters was Ruth Fuller Everett, a British socialite
and the mother-in-law of Alan Watts.
Shortly before Sokei-an's death in 1945, he and Everett would wed,
at which point she took the name Ruth
Fuller Sasaki.

In 1914, under the leadership of Koyu
Uchida, who succeeded Shuye Sonoda as the head of Jodo Shinshu
missionary effort in North America, several Japanese Buddhist
congregations formed the Buddhist Mission of North America (BMNA).
This organization would later form the basis of the Buddhist Churches of America,
currently the largest and most influential ethnic-based Buddhist
organization in the U.S. The BMNA focused primarily on social and
cultural activities for and ministering to Japanese American
communities. In the late 1920s, it first began to develop programs
to train English-speaking priests, for the benefit of the growing
number of American-born parishioners. Also, in 1927, the
Soto sect of Japanese Zen opened its own
mission with Zenshuji temple in Los Angeles, although it did not make attempts at the time to
attract non-Japanese members.

One American who made his own attempt to establish an American
Buddhist movement was Dwight Goddard
(1861 – 1939). Goddard had been a Christian missionary to China,
when he first came in contact with Buddhism. In 1928, he spent a
year living at a Zen monastery in Japan. In 1934, he founded "The
Followers of Buddha, an American Brotherhood", with the goal of
applying the traditional monastic structure of Buddhism more
strictly than Senzaki and Sokei-an. The group was largely
unsuccessful: no Americans were recruited to join as monks and
attempts failed to attract a Chinese Chan (Zen)
master to come to the United States. However, Goddard's efforts as
an author and publisher bore considerable fruit. In 1930, he began
publishing ZEN: A Buddhist Magazine. In 1932, he
collaborated with D.T.Suzuki (see below), on a translation
of the Lankavatara Sutra. That
same year, he published the first edition of A Buddhist Bible, an anthology of
Buddhist scriptures focusing on those used in Chinese and Japanese
Zen, which was enormously influential.[111849]

However, another Japanese person, also an associate of Soyen
Shaku's, had an even greater literary impact. This was D. T.
Suzuki. At the World Parliament of Religions in 1893, Paul Carus
befriended Soyen Shaku and requested his help in translating and
preparing Oriental spiritual literature for publication in the
West. Shaku instead recommended Suzuki, then a young scholar and
former disciple of his. Starting in 1897, Suzuki worked from Dr.
Carus's home in Illinois; his first projects were translations of
the Tao Te Ching and Asvaghosa's Awakening of Faith in the
Mahayana. At the same time, Suzuki began writing his first
major book, Outlines of Mahayana Buddhism, which was
published in 1907. Suzuki returned to Japan in 1909 and married an
American Theosophist and Radcliffe graduate in 1911. Through
English language essays and books, such as Essays in Zen
Buddhism (1927), he established himself as the most visible
literary expositor of Zen Buddhism, its unofficial goodwill
ambassador to Western readers, until his death in 1966. His 1949
book, An Introduction to Zen Buddhism, featured a 30-page
introduction by Carl Jung, an emblem of
the deepening relationship between Buddhism and major Western
thinkers.

Modern American Buddhism

Buddhist American scholar Charles Prebish believes there are three
broad types of American Buddhism. The oldest and largest of these
is "immigrant" or "ethnic Buddhism", those Buddhist traditions that
arrived in America along with immigrants who were already believers
and that largely remained with those immigrants and their
descendants. The next oldest and arguably the most visible group
Prebish refers to as "import Buddhists", because they came to
America largely in response to the demand of interested American
converts who sought them out, either by going abroad or by
supporting foreign teachers; this is sometimes also called "elite
Buddhism" because its practitioners, especially early in the
process, tended to come from social elites. The newest trend in
Buddhism is "export" or "evangelical Buddhist", groups based in
another country and but who actively recruit members in the US from
various backgrounds. By far, the most successful of these has been
Soka Gakkai. Modern Buddhism is not just an American
phenomenon, its' appeal remains universal although becoming adpted
to contemporary circumstance.

Japanese Buddhism

The Buddhist Churches of
America and the Honpa Hongwanji Mission of Hawaii is a national
immigrant Buddhist organization in the United States. The BCA is an
affiliate of Japan's Nishi Hongwanji, a sect of Jōdo Shinshū, which is in turn a form of
Pure Land Buddhism. Tracing its
roots to the Young Men's Buddhist Association founded in San
Francisco at the end of the 19th century and the Buddhist Mission
of North America founded in 1899, it took its current form in 1944.
All of the Buddhist Mission's leadership, along with almost the
entire Japanese American population, had been interned during
World War II. The name Buddhist Churches of America
was adopted at Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah; the use of
the word "church", which normally implies a Christian house of
worship, was significant. After internment ended, some
members returned to the West Coast and revitalized churches there,
while a number of others moved to the Midwest and built new churches. During the 1960s and
1970s, the BCA was in a growth phase and was very successful at
fund-raising. It also began to publish two periodicals, one in
Japanese and one in English. However, since 1980, BCA
membership has declined markedly. The Honpa Hongwanji Mission of
Hawaii has 36 temples throughout the state of Hawaii. The history
and organization of the Mission is quite similar to the BCA.

Koyasan Buddhist temple in Little
Tokyo (L.A.)

It is interesting to note that, while a very large majority of the
Buddhist Churches of America's membership are ethnically Japanese, it does have some
members from non-Asian backgrounds. Thus, it can be seen as having
some, currently very limited, aspects of an export Buddhist
institution. As declining involvement by its ethnic community
creates questions about its future, there has been internal
discussion as to whether it should devote more attention to
attracting the broader public.

Taiwanese Buddhism

Another
institution with some appeal both to a specific ethnic group as
well as to Americans generally is Hsi Lai Temple in Hacienda Heights, California.Hsi Lai is the American headquarters of
Fo Guang Shan, an enormously
successful modern Buddhist group in Taiwan. Hsi
Lai was built in 1988 at a cost of $10 million and is often
described as the largest Buddhist temple in the Western hemisphere.
Although it continues to cater primarily to Chinese Americans, it
also has regular services and outreach programs in English. Hsi Lai
was at the center of a bizarre incident in the history of American
Buddhism when a 1996
fund-raising event by Vice President Al
Gore provoked a controversy; at the time Hsi Lai was often
referred to in the media as simply "the Buddhist temple".

Import Buddhists

The Zen Buddhist Temple in Chicago,
part of the Buddhist Society for Compassionate Wisdom

Since Henry Steele Olcott travelled to Sri Lanka in 1880,
interested Americans have sought out Buddhist teachers from a
variety of countries in Asia, many of which have now established
their teachings in America. The three most notable trends of this
type are Zen, Tibetan Buddhism, and Vipassana, which is an outgrowth of Theravada
Buddhism. Because its membership tends strongly to be among
educated, white, native English speakers, import Buddhism has come
to enjoy a higher level of prominence and prestige than other types
of Buddhism in America.

Settling in the United States even earlier was Soyu Matsuoka-roshi, who established the
Chicago Buddhist Temple in 1949 (now the Zen Buddhist Temple of
Chicago) and was a great dynamic influence in both America and
Japan, lecturing and providing Zen training to many people. Rev.
Dr. Soyu Matsuoka-roshi served as superintendent and abbot of the
Long Beach Zen Buddhist Temple and Zen Center. The Temple was
headquarters to Zen Centers in Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles,
Seattle, and Everett, Washington. Matsuoka-Roshi was born in Japan
into a family that has a history of Zen priests dating back six
hundred years. Matsuoka attended Komazawa University in Tokyo, where he
graduated with a bachelor's degree. He was sent to America to serve
as a founder of temples both in Los Angeles and San Francisco. He
then furthered his extensive graduate work at Columbia University
with Dr. D.T. Suzuki. Finally, he established the Temple at Long
Beach in 1971, where he resided until his passing in 1998.

Sanbo Kyodan Zen is a contemporary
Japanese Zen lineage which has had an impact in the West
disproportionate to its size in Japan. It is rooted in the
reformist teachings of Harada Daiun
Sogaku (1871-1961) and his disciple Yasutani Hakuun (1885-1971), who argued
that the existing Zen institutions of Japan, the Soto and Rinzai sects, had become
complacent and, with few exceptions, were unable to teach real
Dharma. Harada had studied with both Soto and
Rinzai teachers and Yasutani founded Sanbo Kyodan in 1954 to
preserve what he saw as the vital core of teachings from both
schools. Sanbo Kyodan's first American member was Philip Kapleau, who first traveled to Japan
in 1945 as a court reporter for the war crimes trials. In 1947,
Kapleau visited D. T. Suzuki at Engaku-ji in Japan and in the early
1950s, he was a frequent attendee of Suzuki's Columbia lectures. In
1953, he returned to Japan, where he met with Nakagawa Soen, a protégé of Nyogen Senzaki. At Nakagawa's recommendation,
he began to study with Harada and later with Yasutani, whose
disciple he became. In 1965, he published a book, The Three Pillars of Zen,
which recorded a set of talks by Yasutani outlining his approach to
practice, along with transcripts of dokusan interviews and some
additional texts.

The book quickly became popular in America and Europe, contributing
to the prominence of the Sanbo Kyodan approach to Zen. Later in 1965,
Kapleau returned to America and, in 1966, established the Rochester
Zen Center in Rochester, New York, making him the first American-born Zen priest to
found a training temple. In 1967, Kapleau had a falling out
with Yasutani over some of Kapleau's moves to Americanize the style
of his temple, after which it became independent of Sanbo Kyodan.
The Rochester Zen Center is now part of a network of related
centers in the United States, Canada, Europe, Mexico, and New
Zealand, referred to collectively as the Cloud Water Sangha. One of
Kapleau's most notable early disciples was Toni Packer, who herself left Rochester in 1981
to found a nonsectarian meditation center, not specifically
Buddhist or Zen.

Robert Aitken is another
important American member of Sanbo Kyodan. He was first introduced
to Zen as a prisoner in Japan during the Second World War.
After
returning to the United States, he began studying with Nyogen
Senzaki in Los
Angeles in the early 1950s.In 1959, while still
a Zen student himself, he founded the Diamond Sangha, a zendo in Honolulu,
Hawaii. Three years later, the Diamond Sangha
hosted the first U.S. visit by Yasutani Hakuun, who would visit
various locations in the U.S. six more times before 1969. Aitken
traveled frequently to Japan and became a disciple of Yamada Koun, Yasutani's successor as head of the
Sanbo Kyodan. Aitken became a dharma heir of Yamada's, authored
more than ten books, and developed the Diamond Sangha into an
international network with temples in the United States, Argentina,
Germany, and Australia. In 1995, he and his organization split with
Sanbo Kyodan in response to reorganization of the latter following
Yamada's death. The Pacific Zen
Institute led by John Tarrant,
Aitken's first Dharma successor continues as an independent Zen
line.

Soto Zen Priest Shunryu Suzuki (not to be confused with
D.T.Suzuki)
arrived in San Francisco in 1959, where he quietly began teaching a
growing number of native-born American students, who would go on to
form the core of the San
Francisco Zen Center and its eventual network of Zen centers
across the country, including the Tassajara Zen Mountain Center,
one of the first Zen training centers in the Western world. His
low-key teaching style became widely know to the public with the
publication of Zen Mind,
Beginner's Mind, a compilation of Zen talks given by this
highly influential roshi.

Another influential Japanese Zen teacher was Taizan Maezumi, who arrived as a young priest
to serve at Zenshuji, the North American Sōtō sect headquarters in Los Angeles, in
1956. Like Shunryu Suzuki, he showed considerable interest in
teaching Zen to Americans of various backgrounds and, by the
mid-1960s, had formed a regular zazen group. In 1967, he and his
supporters founded the Zen
Center of Los Angeles. He was later instrumental in
establishing the Kuroda Institute and the Soto Zen Buddhist Association,
the latter an organization of American teachers with ties to the
Soto tradition. In addition to his membership in Soto, Maezumi was
also recognized as an heir by a Rinzai
teacher and by Yasutani Hakuun of
the Sanbo Kyodan. Maezumi, in turn, had several American dharma
heirs who have become prominent, such as Bernie Glassman, John Daido Loori, Charlotte Joko Beck, and Dennis Genpo Merzel. His successors and
their network of centers have organized as the White Plum Sangha.[111851]

Among the most influential Rinzai Zen
teachers to establish their lineages in United States have been
Kyozan Joshu Sasaki Roshi,
Eido Tai Shimano Roshi, and
Omori Sogen Roshi. Sasaki founded the
Mount Baldy Zen Center and
its branches after coming to Los Angeles from Japan in 1962. One of
his most famous students was the Canadian poet and musician
Leonard Cohen. Eido Roshi founded
Dai Bosatsu Zendo
Kongo-ji, an influential training center in New York state. Omori Roshi founded Daihonzan
Chozen-ji, the first Rinzai headquarters temple established outside
of Japan, in Honolulu, HI; under his students Tenshin Tanouye Roshi
and Dogen Hosokawa Roshi, several other training centers in the USA
were established including Daiyuzenji in
Chicago, IL.

Not all the successful Zen teachers in the United States have been
from Japanese traditions. There have also been teachers of Chinese
Zen (also known as Chan), Korean Zen (or Seon),
and Vietnamese Zen (or Thien).

The first Chinese Buddhist priest to teach Westerners in America
was Hsuan Hua, a disciple of the
preeminent 20th century Chan master, Hsu
Yun. In 1962, Hsuan Hua moved to San Francisco's
Chinatown, where, in addition to Zen, he taught Chinese Pure
Land, Tiantai, Vinaya,
and Vajrayana Buddhism. Initially,
his students were mostly ethnic Chinese, but he eventually
attracted a range of followers. In 1970, Hsuan Hua founded Gold Mountain
Monastery in San Francisco and in 1976 he established a retreat
center, the City Of Ten
Thousand Buddhas, on a 237 acre (959,000 m²) property in
Talmage,
California. These monasteries are noted for their close
adherence to the vinaya, the austere
traditional Buddhist monastic code. Hsuan Hua also founded the
Buddhist Text Translation Society, which works on the translation
of scriptures into English.

Another Chinese Chan teacher with a Western
following is Sheng-yen, a master trained
in both the Caodong and Linji schools (equivalent to the Japanese Soto and
Rinzai, respectively). He first visited the United States in 1978
under the sponsorship of the Buddhist Association
of the United States, an organization of Chinese American
Buddhists. In 1980, he founded the Ch'an Mediation
Society in Queens, New
York. In 1985, he founded the Chung-hwa Institute
of Buddhist Studies in Taiwan, which now sponsors a variety of
Chinese Zen activities in the United States.[111852].

Two notable Vietnamese Zen teachers have been influential in
America: Thich Thien-An and Thich Nhat Hanh. Thich Thien-An came
to America in 1966 as a visiting professor at UCLA and taught traditional Thien meditation.
Thich Nhat Hanh was a monk in Vietnam
during the Vietnam War, during which he
was a peace activist. In response to these activities, he was
nominated for the Nobel Peace
Prize in 1967 by Martin
Luther King, Jr. In 1966, he left Vietnam in exile and now
resides at Plum Village, a monastery in
France. He
has written more than one hundred books about Buddhism, which have
made him one of the very few most prominent Buddhist authors among
the general readership in the West. In his books and talks, Thich
Nhat Hanh emphasizes mindfulness
(sati) as the most important practice in daily life. His
monastic students live and practice at two centers in the United
States: Deer Park Monastery in Escondido, CA, and Blue Cliff
Monastery in Pine Bush, NY.

The best-known Tibetan Buddhist lama to live in the United States
was Chögyam Trungpa.
Trungpa,
part of the Kagyu school of Tibetan Buddhism,
moved to England in 1963, founded a temple in Scotland, and then relocated to Barnet, Vermont, and Boulder, Colorado in 1970. He established a series of what he
named Dharmadhatu meditation centers, which were eventually
organized under a national umbrella group called Vajradhatu (later to become Shambhala International). The
methods and techniques he developed for teaching Westerners he
termed Shambhala Training. He
founded The Naropa Institute (now Naropa University) in Boulder, CO
in the late seventies. Naropa is well known as a premier choice for
those seeking undergraduate or graduate degrees in Buddhism,
Transpersonal and Buddhist Psychology as well as Creative Writing.
The writing program at Naropa (The Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics) was founded by Allen Ginsberg, a Buddhist and
close friend of Trungpa. Following Trungpa's death, his followers
built the Great
Stupa of Dharmakaya, a traditional reliquary monument, near
Red Feather
Lakes, Colorado.Consecrated in 2001, it is the largest
stupa in the United States.[111853]

There are four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism: the Gelug, the
Kagyu, the Nyingma,
and the Sakya. Of these, the greatest impact
in the West was made by the Gelug, which is led by the Dalai Lama,
and the Kagyu, specifically its Karma
Kagyu branch, which is led by the Karmapa. As of the early 1990s, there were several
significant strands of Kagyu practice in the United States: Chögyam
Trungpa's Shambhala movement; Karma Triyana Dharmachakra, a network of centers affiliated directly with the
Karmapa's North American seat in Woodstock, New York; a network of centers founded by Kalu Rinpoche.

Also quite active in the United States is the New Kadampa Tradition (NKT)
established by Geshe Kelsang
Gyatso. An offshoot of the Gelug school founded in the 1990s in
the UK, the NKT has over 50 Kadampa (NKT) Buddhist Centers and
branches in the United States. Most members of the organization are
Westerners or in the far east, principally in Hong Kong and
Singapore.

Vipassana

Vipassana, also referred to by the rough
translation "insight meditation" is an ancient meditative practice
described in the Pali Canon of the
Theravada school of Buddhism, and in
similar scriptures of other schools. Vipassana also refers
to a distinct movement which was begun in the 20th century by
reformers such as Mahāsi Sayādaw, a
Burmese monk. Mahāsi Sayādaw was a Theravada
bhikkhu and Vipassana is rooted in the
Theravada teachings, but its goal is to simplify ritual and other
peripheral activities in order to make meditative practice more
effective and available both to monks and to laypeople. This
openness to lay involvement is an important development in
Theravada, which has sometimes appeared to focus exclusively on
monasticism.

In 1965,
monks from Sri Lanka established the Washington Buddhist Vihara in
Washington,
D.C., the first Theravada monastic community in the
United States. The Vihara was fairly accessible to
English-speakers, and naturally vipassana meditation was part of it
activities. However, the direct influence of the Vipassana movement
would not reach the U.S. until a group of Americans returned there
in the early 1970s after studying with Vipassana master in Asia.
Joseph Goldstein, after journeying to
Southeast Asia with the Peace Corps, had
lived in Bodhgaya, where he was a student of Anagarika Munindra, the head monk of
Mahabodhi
Temple and himself a student of Māhāsai Sayādaw's.Jack Kornfield had also been in the
Peace Corps in Southeast Asia, after which he studied and ordained
in the Thai Forest Tradition
under Ajahn Chah, who was perhaps the
most influential figure in 20th century Thai Buddhism. Sharon Salzberg went to India in 1971 as a
spiritual seeker and studied with Dipa Ma, a
former Calcutta housewife trained in vipassana by Māhāsai
Sayādaw[111854].

In 1989, the Insight Meditation Center established the Barre Center for Buddhist
Studies near the IMS headquarters, with the goal of promoting
scholarly investigation of Buddhism from various perspectives. It
director is Mu Seong, a former Korean Zen
monk.

S.N.Goenka is a Burmese-born meditation
teacher who can also be considered part of the Vipassana movement.
His teacher, Sayagyi U Ba Khin of Burma,
was a contemporary of Māhāsi Sayādaw's, and taught a style of
Buddhism with similar emphases on simplicity and accessibility to
laypeople. Goenka has established a method of instruction which has
proven very popular in Asia and throughout the world. In 1981, he
established the Vipassana Research
Institute based in Igatpuri,
India. He and his students have built several
active centers in North America. [111855]

Soka Gakkai

Soka Gakkai, which literally means "Society of Value Establishment
Studies", was founded in Japan in 1930 as a fraternal auxiliary to
Nichiren Shoshu, a minor sect of
Nichiren Buddhism. It was perhaps the most successful of Japan's
new religious movements , which enjoyed tremendous growth after the
end of the Second World War. During
the occupation of Japan, some
American soldiers became aware of it, and it was the Japanese wives
of veterans who became the first active Soka Gakkai members in the
West . A U.S. branch was formally organized on October 13, 1960. Its
Korean-Japanese leader took the name George M.Williams to emphasize his commitment to
reaching the English-speaking public. Soka Gakkai expanded rapidly
in the U.S. One of the results of this outreach is that Soka Gakkai
has been much more effective than any other group at attracting
non-Asian minority converts , chiefly African American and Latino, to Buddhism. It has
also been successful in attracting the support of celebrities, such
as Tina Turner, Herbie Hancock, and Orlando Bloom.

Soka Gakkai has no priests of its own and was originally part of
Nichiren Shoshu, a formal religious sect in Japan. In fact, its
United States branch was originally named Nichiren Shoshu America (NSA).
However, in 1991 Soka Gakkai split from Nichiren Shoshu and became
a separate organization; at that time, the U.S. branch changed its
name to Soka Gakkai International—United States of America
(SGI-USA). Nichiren Shoshu proper maintains six temples of its own
in the U.S. and another Nichiren group exists which is primarily
the domain of ethnic Japanese.

The main religious practice of Soka Gakkai members, like other
Nichiren Buddhists, is chanting the mantra Nam Myōhō Renge Kyō and sections of
the Lotus Sutra. Unlike import Buddhist
trends such as Zen, Vipassana, and Tibetan Buddhism, Soka Gakkai
does not teach meditative techniques other than chanting.

Demographics of Buddhism in the United States

It is not easy to arrive at an accurate idea of the number of
Buddhists in the United States. The simplest reason is that it is
not at all clear how to define who is and who is not a Buddhist.
The easiest and most intuitive definition is one based on
self-description, but this has its pitfalls. Because Buddhism
exists as a cultural concept in American society, there may be
individuals who self-describe as Buddhists but have essentially no
knowledge of or commitment to Buddhism as a religion or practice;
on the other hand, others may be deeply involved in meditation and
committed to the Buddhadharma, but may refuse the label "Buddhist".
Despite these difficulties, several scholars have investigated this
question. Most studies have indicated a Buddhist population in the
United States of between 1 and 4 million. The U.S. State
Department's International Religious Freedom Report for 2004
indicates that 2% of the U.S. population is Buddhist, which would
mean a total of 5,973,446 Buddhists. Other estimates are larger: in
the 1990s, Robert A.F.Thurman stated his opinion that there
were 5 to 6 million Buddhists in America, and others might
speculate there are more. Whatever the total number, it appears
that roughly 75 to 80 percent of Buddhists in the U.S. are of Asian
descent and inherited Buddhism as a family tradition; the remaining
20 to 25 percent are non-Asians.

Ethnic divide

Discussion about Buddhism in America has sometimes focused on the
issue of the visible ethnic divide separating ethnic Buddhist
congregations from import Buddhist groups.[111856] Although many Zen and Tibetan Buddhist
temples were founded by Asians, they now tend to attract very few
Asian-American members. With the exception of Soka Gakkai, almost all active Buddhist groups
in America can be readily classed as either ethnic or import
Buddhism based on the demographics of their membership. There is
often very limited contact between these Buddhists of different
ethnic groups. This divide can be disturbing in view of the
historical necessity of relying on Asian peoples to transmit
Buddhism, and in light of ongoing and complex tensions surrounding
ethnicity and immigration in America. Some Asian-American Buddhists
feel that their non-Asian counterparts ignore the many
contributions of their ethnic communities toward the development of
American Buddhism.

However, the cultural divide should not necessarily be seen as
pernicious. It is often argued that the differences between
Buddhist groups arise benignly from the differing needs and
interests of those involved. Convert Buddhists tend to be
interested in meditation and philosophy, in some cases eschewing the trappings
of religiosity altogether. On the other hand, for immigrants and
their descendants, preserving tradition and maintaining a social
framework assume a much greater relative importance, making their
approach to religion naturally more conservative. Further, Kenneth
K. Tanaka suggests, based on a survey of Asian-American Buddhists
in San Francisco, that "many Asian-American Buddhists view
non-Asian Buddhism as still in a formative, experimental stage" and
yet they believe that it "could eventually mature into a religious
expression of exceptional quality".[111857]

Additional questions come from the demographics within import
Buddhism. Researchers and casual observers alike report that the
vast majority of American converts practicing at Buddhist centers
are white, often from Christian or
Jewish backgrounds. Only Soka Gakkai has
attracted significant numbers of African-American or Latino
members. A variety of ideas have been broached regarding the
nature, causes, and significance of this racial uniformity.
Journalist Clark Strand noted that

…that it has tried to recruit [African-Americans] at all makes
Soka Gakkai International utterly unique in American Buddhism.

Strand, writing for Tricycle (an American Buddhist journal) in
2004, notes that SGI has specifically targeted African-Americans,
Latinos and Asians, and other writers have noted that this approach
has begun to spread, with Vipassana and Theravada retreats aimed at
non-white practitioners led by a handful of specific
teachers.

A key question is the degree of importance ascribed to
discrimination, which is suggested to be mostly unconscious, on the
part of white converts toward potential minority converts. To some
extent, the racial divide is indicative of a class divide, because
convert Buddhists tend strongly to be drawn from the more educated
segments of society. Among the African American Buddhists who have
commented on the dynamics of the racial divide in convert Buddhism
are Jan Willis and Charles R.Johnson.[111858]

Trends in American Buddhism

Engaged Buddhism

An important trend that has developed in Buddhism in the West is
socially engaged Buddhism. While
some critics have asserted that the term is redundant, as it is
mistaken to believe that Buddhism in the past has not affected and
been affected by the surrounding society, others have suggested
that Buddhism is sometimes seen as too quietistic and passive
toward public life. This is particularly true in the West, where
almost all converts to Buddhism come to it outside of an existing
family or community tradition. Engaged Buddhism is an attempt to
apply Buddhist values to larger social problems, including war and environmental
concerns. The term engaged Buddhism was
coined by Thich Nhat Hanh, who developed
the idea during his years as a peace activist in Vietnam. The most notable engaged Buddhist
organization is the Buddhist
Peace Fellowship, which was founded in 1978 by Robert Aitken, Anne Aitken, Nelson
Foster, and others and received early assistance from Gary Snyder, Jack
Kornfield, and Joanna Macy.[111859] Another engaged Buddhist group is the
Zen Peacemaker Order, which was
founded in 1996 by Bernie
Glassman and Sandra Jishu
Holmes.[111860]

Buddhist Education in the United States

A variety of Buddhist groups have established institutions of
higher learning in America. The first four-year Buddhist college in the
U.S. was the Naropa
Institute (now Naropa University), which was founded in 1974
by Chögyam Trungpa. It has enjoyed consistent involvement
both from convert Buddhists and counterculture personalities, such
as Allen Ginsberg, who christened the
Institute's poetry department the "Jack Kerouac School of
Disembodied Poetics". Naropa is currently fully accredited and
offers degrees in some subjects not directly related to Buddhism.
Another Buddhist university is the University of the West, which is
affiliated with Hsi Lai Temple and was, until recently called Hsi
Lai University. Soka University of America, in Aliso Viejo California, was founded by the
Soka Gakkai as a secular school closely committed to philosophic
Buddhism. The City of Ten Thousand Buddhas is the site of
Dharma Realm Buddhist
University, a four-year college teaching courses primarily
related to Buddhism but including some general-interest subjects.
The Institute of Buddhist
Studies in Berkeley, California, in addition to offering a
Masters Degree in Buddhist Studies acts as the ministerial training
arm of the Buddhist Churches of America and is affiliated with the
Graduate Theological
Union. The school recently moved into its new headquarters
within the Jodo Shinshu Center in Berkeley.